Travel Issue 2018http://www.openthemagazine.com/taxonomy/term/26006/feed
enThe Liberation Theory of a Singular Travellerhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/travel-issue-2018/the-liberation-theory-of-a-singular-traveller
<p>EARLIER THIS YEAR, a friend lent me his derelict house in a small village in Tamil Nadu. I had been keen to visit the Mahashivaratri celebrations at a nearby yoga centre. However, since my trip was last minute, it wasn’t possible to get accommodation there. And so, instead of staying in the city 30 km away, I decided to take up my friend’s offer. I had imagined it to be in better condition, but I engaged a local person to give it a thorough cleaning and decided to make do. I put up my tent inside and stayed there for over a week. For windows, there were gaping holes in the wall with bamboo stick fences, and the bathroom was a small structure 200 metres on the other side of a weedy yard. It was my first time in an actual village. Every day I would wake up to multiple cock-a-doodles all around, except one morning when it was drowned by a domestic fight nearby. Walking out of the house in the morning on fresh cow-dung layered lanes, traditional <em>rangolis</em> outside the doors, colourful flower trellises, dogs that looked ill and villagers staring at me as I pass by—it was a tick mark on a checklist item that I didn’t know existed. I felt my years of travelling solo pay off in the kind of life I wanted to live. To know the people and the land, and to be comfortable with the unexpected. Sometimes it takes me a while to realise that I actually love the strange situations that travel puts me in.</p>
<p>The first trip I embarked on alone was in 2009. I had read online about women travellers from foreign countries who didn’t even know our language but journeyed across India all by themselves. Out of sheer curiosity, I planned a 15-day trip from Mumbai to Coimbatore, by way of Goa, Bangalore and Mysore, which became one of my all-time favourite places, with its two massive lakes, Kukurahalli and Karanji, and the lovely walking tracks around them. This was also when I met one of my first Twitter friends outside Mumbai. And the trend continued on later trips. I would always try and meet the Twitterati of any new city I visit. While going from Goa to Bangalore via an overnight bus, I had specified that I was a woman while booking my seat, and yet, there was a man on the next one. The seats were all full and while there were a couple of other women, they were with kids, so I didn’t try to swap. Anyway, I gauged the guy and figured it was going to be okay. And it was. Since then, for the next many years, overnight Volvos were my thing, crisscrossing places like Bangalore, Mysore, Coimbatore, Kanyakumari, Udupi, Mangalore, Hampi, Pondicherry, Kochi and Coonoor.</p>
<p>In the journeys that followed, I kept getting pushed out of my comfort zone. Sometimes I would be late reaching my accommodation or sometimes too early. Sometimes I fell sick. One summer I was in Jagannath Puri, my first ever visit to the Odisha side of the country, and I spent most of it with viral fever. I managed to go out and get some medicines, but couldn’t explore as I had planned. Sometimes I feel awkward being alone or I can’t figure how to navigate my way through the dense crowds of a bus stand. On the other hand, there are the amazing experiences of solo travel. Like making new friends of completely different backgrounds. Once it so happened that I was in Coonoor during winter and had no warm clothing with me. Being from Mumbai, I didn’t expect Coonoor to be so cold. A Canadian lady at the nearby table saw me shivering and got me some woollen socks from her bag. Now I count her and her husband among my dearest friends.</p>
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<p>Travel is not the only thing in my life. I have other deep interests like yoga and entrepreneurship. Travel has only been an attempt to live the best life possible</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Celebrating new festivals on the road can also be very enjoyable. Like the traditional Pongal celebration that I was part of at Isha Yoga Centre in Coimbatore. It opened me to the world of farmers and cattle. Experiencing places by plan can be wonderful, but so also is finding places one has never heard about, like the beautiful Rewalsar town near Mandi in Himachal Pradesh. It has a serene lake sacred to three religions, a cave temple to meditate and an authentic Tibetan community. I was overwhelmed by it.</p>
<p>MY TRAVELS GAVE me deeper insights into the world, its people, their culture, and society. Now when the Government comes up with a cow policy, I actually know how villagers in Himachal and Tamil Nadu feel about their cows. I have grown more comfortable in my skin and accepted many of my weaknesses. For example, I can’t bargain well. So, I made peace with the fact that I would get fleeced every now and then. And it happens pretty much every time I need to take a rickshaw in Tamil Nadu. Another defining aspect of solo travel is the inevitable trust that develops for the world around. Because, at the end of day, it’s those around me that I have to rely on to share my joys and sorrows. People usually worry about who to contact in case there is a problem. But it is also important to consider that as a solo traveller, who do I celebrate with if I am happy? And over the years, I am learning how to do this. To invite not-so-well-known people into my joys. In India, it’s easier to find people who treat me like family while travelling. They will advise me about marriage, what places to see, how to spend my time, and do random chit-chat. In Agra, for example, a fellow train passenger found me a taxi outside the station, negotiated the rates and even suggested places to see.</p>
<p>The first few years, I travelled only around south India. Once I felt more adept, I visited north India as well—Himachal Pradesh, Agra, Varanasi, Jaipur and Pushkar, to name a few places. These were not quick weekend trips but longer adventures of a few weeks or a month. I worked on the side when I travelled. I had a social media marketing agency and so whenever I didn’t have any client meetings coming up in Mumbai, I could travel and work off the laptop.</p>
<p>In 2015, my travelling shifted gears. I wrapped up my agency and was looking at a few months of only travel. That’s when I planned my first international trip to Europe. I kept digging for a different travel experience and I came across cycle touring. Basically, carry all the luggage on the cycle, and well, cycle. I found a guy in Mumbai who had cycle toured around the world. I got in touch with him and he made everything simple for me.</p>
<p>A flurry of planning and paperwork followed. I had to plan out the gear I would need, like the cycle, cycling tools and the camping setup. I had to finalise my route well in advance because Europe is so huge and diverse. Finally, after looking at many options, I chose the Berlin to Copenhagen velo route. This is an officially marked route for international cyclists, which would be good for a newbie like me. I also had to keep my luggage minimum so I could load it on my cycle. The visa was another big challenge because the agent said that a solo application will be rejected. I then consulted a few travel friends and successfully applied on my own.</p>
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<p>Mysore became one of my all-time favourite places, with its two massive lakes, Kukurahalli and Karanji, and the lovely walking tracks around them</p>
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<p>There were more challenges to tackle, but I landed in Berlin and had 12 days to buy my gear. I searched online and spoke to a lot of locals to find the right shops. Buying gear in Berlin is a breeze, thanks to the city’s knowledgeable staff and lower prices compared to the rest of Europe. The day of leaving arrived, and on my way to my first campsite, I took a halt to check whether my luggage was loaded properly. An old Afghani was sitting nearby. We chatted a while and he was happy to know that I was Indian. I met people from all over the world on the ride.</p>
<p>I cycled alone from Berlin to Copenhagen, 700 km, in 17 days. I camped out most nights. A ‘heat wave’ was on in Europe at the time, so the temperature was around 300 Celsius, which was quite comfortable for me. The first night, I didn’t put the protective top layer of the tent, as it was so warm. And as I slept off, through the tent mesh, I could see the stars twinkling above. For the first few days it was difficult to process the experience because everything I was doing was so new. It was only towards the end of the trip that I started getting used to being on the road with no real plan in mind except to cycle onwards. I loved it. And yet, I had to end it soon in Copenhagen. Even in Europe, solo cycling and camping is not commonplace for women. Many there had never seen an Indian cycle touring and were surprised to see me—the same reaction that I get in India.</p>
<p>I have travelled alone in India, Europe, Australia and Taiwan, and found one similarity everywhere: locals don’t think their country is safe. This was true even in Taiwan, which I found one of the safest countries. The other commonality: no one trusts their government. When I came back from Taiwan, I wanted to solo cycle tour in India too. So in December 2016, I went on a three-day cycling trip in south India. I had already solo travelled in the south, so I felt most comfortable here. I chose to cycle from Chennai to Tiruvannamalai, through Mahabalipuram and Kanchipuram. I took a day’s halt at Kanchipuram to see its historic temples. The roads were beautiful. And I came across so many interesting places, like the temple at Thirukulakendrum where an eagle comes to eat the offered food every day at 12 pm sharp. Since then, I have gone cycling in Himachal Pradesh, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jagannath Puri and a few other towns of India.</p>
<p>Solo travel for me started with very ‘safe’ and properly planned trips, but it is now dynamic. I am open to trying out a lot more new stuff, whether it is staying in Tamil Nadu villages or car pooling across Spain. This allows for many more options while travelling and the experience is that much more diverse.</p>
<p>Travel is not the only thing in my life. I have other deep interests like yoga, communications, entrepreneurship. Travel has only been an attempt to live the best life possible. The most important thing is to figure out who I am, and travel is a great tool to know myself better. As a woman, it can be liberating. Because it is not necessary to be afraid to step out. When you walk out of your fences, you may actually find that the world is lovely.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Womanalone1.jpg?itok=jcJast8q" /><div>BY: Priyanka Dalal</div><div>Node Id: 24279</div>Thu, 03 May 2018 16:54:32 +0000vijayopen24279 at http://www.openthemagazine.comDarjeeling of the Mindhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/travel-issue-2018/darjeeling-of-the-mind
<p>ALTHOUGH I HAVE been to Darjeeling a countless number of times, when I glimpsed it this time after a gap of so many years, I felt a little breath swell up in my chest.</p>
<p>Our taxi had coughed and spluttered its way up, from the warmth of the valley through which the Teesta flows, winding our way this way and that, holding on to the back of the seats in front lest we tumble backwards inside the car or plunge into our fellow passengers’ laps, until we ran into such a thick mist that we couldn’t tell if we were inside a fog or a cloud. As our journey progressed, every few minutes a new layer of clothes would appear on our bodies. When I looked backwards, occasionally when the sun permitted, I would see an unmoving cinema-scape of emerald green tea plantations framed in the rear windscreen.</p>
<p>And then there in front of us, shimmering suddenly to light, was Darjeeling. My breath swelled. It was not an exact spot, really. And the town’s marketplace was still some way off. There was no signpost which said you had reached or were reaching. For when you are travelling in these parts, you cannot precisely tell which part ends and which new part begins. For all you know, we were already in Darjeeling, just that it wasn’t visible.</p>
<p>What lay ahead, a sight I had identified as being of Darjeeling, was a patch of brightness as though someone had flicked a light switch on. It was on a sharp bend in a hill we were gradually approaching. At one end of it was a congregation of tall sombre pine trees, and on the other, a steep fall and a sky of such blue depth that this could only have been the Himalayan foothills. We moved from the mist into this inviting glow, the sun suddenly so warm on our cold faces. It lasted only a minute. The vehicle moved through the bend, circled around the hill, and then we disappeared into another cloud of mist.</p>
<p>Darjeeling exists as an uncertain landscape in my memory. As a child growing up in the nearby town of Kalimpong, it was a place that was a little too distant to be called home, yet also too close, too filled with relatives and familiar faces, to be described as a holiday spot. It was neither, and in a way, both—a special place that brought the warmth of home and the adventure of a holiday.</p>
<p>Even today, my mind jumps at the speed bump as you descend into town square, where suddenly a quiet town seen from afar sprawls out in front of you, filled with the cacophony of tourists and locals at the motor-stand, the smell of grease and engine coolant mixed with the juniper and cold pine in the air. The roads, whenever it rained, would be littered with small rainbows in little pools of spilt petrol. Darjeeling is not a mere surface that reflects light. It absorbs light, retains it, and reflects something profound. To a traveller—even someone who has visited it as frequently as I have—the whole place seems to hint at some elaborate meaning hidden behind appearances, something only you can interpret. But you can spend a lifetime here and never grasp it.</p>
<p>I was thinking of those memories as our cab made its way through the fog, when the vehicle’s lights lit up the silhouette of the Hanuman shrine that rests on another sharp bend. A memory was tickled again. My father stooping in his seat to catch my ear, in a vehicle just like this, so no one else could hear, pointing to the shrine. Hanuman was somewhere mid-air in his massive leap from Lanka to the Himalayas to procure the Sanjeevani herb—my father went on in that grave voice of his—when he was afflicted with a severe stomach ache and made an unscheduled stop, unknown both to mythologists and the devout, except my father and now me. Here, at this unremarkable spot in a distant Indian town, he found relief. He broke wind. All of us, all these thousands of years later—he continued in that self-serious voice—were still living, or in our case travelling, within the fog of his flatulence. The silhouette of the shrine now appeared closer, and in the fog, I could make out the muscular statue of Hanuman, and just for the briefest of moments, a smile on his face.</p>
<p>A Saul Bellow character in <em>Humboldt’s Gift</em>, a stand-in no doubt for Chicago’s great writer himself, gazing at a sunset on an unremarkable horizon, speaks of how his childhood in the windy city had trained him to make something even of scant settings. “In Chicago you became a connoisseur of the near-nothing,” he said. “With a clear eye I looked at a clear scene, I appreciated the red sumac, the white rocks, the rust of the weeds, the wig of green on the bluff over the crossroads.” What do you do with the training a place like Darjeeling imparts you with? It is a front row seat to the world’s most majestic mountains. The scene is never clear. Everything beautiful is crowding in, the hills, the occasional snowflakes, the people cold in their faces and warm with brandy, defying clarity and description. After this, nothing can ever be as beautiful again.</p>
<p>I opened the curtains of my window. I had checked myself into what could be described as a luxury hotel; everything that gives you more than a bucket of hot water in Darjeeling is luxurious. Outside, a bell pealed, and I discovered a small primary school right beside my window. Things are simple where time is still measured in bells. Dressed in shorts and caps, children lined up in messy rows and gave a rousing performance of their school anthem.</p>
<p>The sun had come out by now.</p>
<p>Until I had left these parts, I did not know many things. I did not know that clothes could dry in a single day, or that the popular coconut hair oil brand, Parachute, is meant to be poured out like any other hair oil, and not spooned out in little scoops of coconut cream. When I first moved to a big city and saw someone pour out the oil on to his palm, I asked him if Parachute had launched a new version of its classic oil.</p>
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<p>The most interesting travel stories are those you undertake to a known place, where the landscape might have changed, but your feet recognise the terrain underneath</p>
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<p>The cold does many things. It freezes your water pipes on winter mornings. It makes you stand hunched, warming your hands by rubbing them together, just like you would spend a good ten minutes warming your car engine. Only then does your body or car obey your commands. So when the sun finally makes an appearance, however fleetingly, you have to step out and mark your obeisance.</p>
<p>It was the same even now. Sunshine is still a precious commodity. So I stepped out too. It was autumn, the month of October, perhaps the best time to be in Darjeeling. Everywhere, little flowers have emerged among bushes. There is a fragrance of leaf decay in the air. In a few more months, everything will return. People will go back inside their homes, the buds will return to their roots.</p>
<p>Underneath my foot, the land thrummed like an old familiar heartbeat. Everything that people owned seemed to be outdoor—beds, blankets, clothes, vegetables, the people themselves, everything that needed to be aired and dried. People were sitting on wicker chairs that they picked up and shifted every few minutes. They were moving themselves, and their conversations, to catch the warm amber slant of the descending sun. Elsewhere, on a terrace, I saw a washed sweater and right below it a pair of trousers laid out to dry, as though its wearer had been suddenly vaporised.</p>
<p>The most interesting travel stories, I’ve often felt, aren’t the journeys you make to some exotic location faraway. It is those you undertake to a known place, where the landscape might have changed, but your feet recognise the terrain underneath. At such places, both you and the place itself begin to participate in a game of showmanship. It is like the meeting between a son and his long-unmet father. Your purpose, you find out, isn’t just to meet your father. It is to show all that you have become, to show all your new possessions and your new life, seeking his acknowledgement and maybe even his envy. But then you realise the place too is showing itself to you. It is showing all you once knew, and all that has been replaced. You can’t help then but find a place to sit and consider how far everything disappears in such a short while. Your memories are just that: memories. They have no echo in the real world.</p>
<p>Darjeeling is both a real and imagined place. It is a palimpsest of histories and accents, of people writing their stories over others’ to form something new entirely. It was built in the 1800s by British officers as an English home on Indian soil so that they could nurse their homesickness and escape the administrative rigours of the plains. But we often forget there were people already here. And in subsequent years, escaping wars and poverty, more people arrived. And once the British left came their native administrators, people from the Bengali middle-class, who projected another idea upon it, that of the nostalgia of an ‘English’ hill station.</p>
<p>For the next three days, I spent all my time in town. I did not travel to the popular hill ranges and tea plantations, preferring instead to seek out old haunts of my childhood. I avoided meeting people I had once known, but I noticed I was looking at passing faces to see if I recognised anyone. I went to Keventers and ordered two hot dogs, like I did as a child (when I would tell anyone who cared to listen how I had consumed dog meat) only to discover how salty they were, or how salty they had always been. I moved through the town towards a zone where old cyber cafes used to be located that offered terrible internet speed but hummed with the amorous activities of young couples behind curtains. They had been torn down and replaced by other shops.</p>
<p>Everywhere, armed men marched to and fro, lugubrious, humourless men who never once looked up to the sky and appreciated the sun. At one spot where the road to Darjeeling’s most popular spot, the Chowrasta, begins, a man stood upright in an open jeep, with an imposing gun screwed into it, scanning each face, the jeep and gun ready to spring into action any time.</p>
<p>An old familiar play, although with a new cast of characters, had played out here. The town was recovering from a 100-day-long strike for a new state. No new state had been achieved; there was peace now, although visibly feeble. Nearby, a man had died in police custody and everything was beginning to be brought to a standstill. For now there was no sign of it in Darjeeling. People were moving about, rationing their thoughts, whispering to one another.</p>
<p>I visited a spot where a few weeks earlier a crude bomb had been lobbed and another where a man had been shot and dragged, his body leaving a trail of blood through the street. I looked at these spots, but apart from a crater on the road, I couldn’t see any trace of these recent events. I found instead a place to sit on the green benches of Chowrasta. A Bengali couple, one of the few tourists in what should otherwise have been a crowded tourist month, approached me. Many years ago, another Bengali couple had approached me and I had behaved insouciantly. The man then, unsure of where he was, had asked me how he could reach Chowrasta. I had pointed to the Mall Road, the road that shoots off from one end of Chowrasta and, circling a picturesque mound, returns to another end of the square. “You see that road,” I told him. “You take that road and you just follow it.” He took my directions but didn’t thank me.</p>
<p>Today, this couple had a less interesting question. They wanted to know where they could find a wine- shop. “Don’t you want to know how to reach Chowrasta?” I asked them. They knew where they were, and mumbling something, perhaps a curse, they went to find a more resourceful local.</p>
<p>I moved away. The tourist season was indeed poor. The restaurants were hardly full. At the taxi stand, vehicles stood in a row of mournful silence. You could only see little children, using the vapour of their breaths, to scribble dirty jokes on the windows of these cars. Night would soon fall. Men and women were hurrying themselves home, not wanting to be caught in any violence the darkness could bring.</p>
<p>Through a window in a house nearby, I saw an old couple. They either did not have children, or they, like me, were elsewhere in a less beautiful but more favourable place. They were in their television room. The sound had been turned down and only the pictures flickered on their faces, faces that registered no emotion.</p>
<p>Each man is on a boundless journey. But here in the hills of Darjeeling, you get that feeling you do when you see the ocean spread out before you: a sense that you have reached the end.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Darjeeling1.jpg?itok=F6T3l95q" /><div>BY: Lhendup G Bhutia</div><div>Node Id: 24278</div>Thu, 03 May 2018 16:45:58 +0000vijayopen24278 at http://www.openthemagazine.comIndian Summer as a Traveller’s Talehttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/travel-issue-2018/indian-summer-as-a-traveller-s-tale
<p>SINCE INDIANS IN the ancient world had no conception of documenting their world as a historical enterprise and the Greeks did, the genesis of a secular account of India can be traced back to Ktesias the Knidian, who had the minor handicap of never having laid a foot on the soil of the country that he was writing about. In addition, Ktesias was no stickler for facts, much of what he wrote being wild exaggerations, but there were reasons for it. He was a Greek physician posted in the court of the Persian emperor towards the end of the 5th century BCE. Over there he heard marvellous accounts of India from Persian visitors and/or from Indians, probably merchants, who were in Persia. When penned down in what is known as <em>The Indika</em>, it became a jumble of extraordinary fabrications over kernels of truth. What further complicated it was that Ktesias’ book itself was lost and its contents are known to us from fragments alluding to it by other ancient writers. We thus have Chinese whispers across space added to Chinese whispers across time. He talks of river waters in India that turn into wine, and, in what would have impressed Hollywood producers, an animal red in colour with a face like a man and three rows of teeth and a tail like a scorpion’s. He also mentions pygmies whose hair grow so much that they wind it around their body like a garment and whose penises are thick and so long that they reach their ankles. In the mid-19th century, the Norwegian orientalist Christian Lassen did a review of Ktesias’ work in which he said that you can’t really say that Ktesias lied all the time, but ‘in most cases his corruptions of the truth originate in his desire to tell unheard-of stories’. And where Ktesias presumably alludes to the summer in India, Lassen, with disapprobation, goes on to comment: ‘It must also be ascribed to fiction that in India the sun appears ten times larger than in other countries, and that the heat there is so powerful that it suffocates many persons.’</p>
<p>Here, we could disagree with Lassen and be in the corner of Ktesias the Knidian. Because, as we all know, in certain parts of India in certain times of the year, in a psychological sense at least the heat can be so suffocating that the sun seems more than magnified. About four years ago, I was in a taxi in the soon-to-be-divided Andhra Pradesh going from Rayalseema to Vijaywada. The jury’s out on the hottest region of India, but Rayalseema is always a strong contender. The air-conditioner was supposed to be on, but outside the heat was so intense that whatever cold the vents blew in turned to hot air even before it hit me. I do remember suffocation and also a great annoyance building up. Since it was pointless to rail against the sun, even if it seemed ten times bigger, I took it out on the driver for his car. But it took only a few newspapers wedged in the windows to bring the temperature down both outside and within me. That heat reminded me of summer holidays in my school days, when, going from Mumbai to Kerala, the <em>Kanyamumari Express</em> took a circuitous route through the centre of south India and, again, in the Andhra plateau with sonorous names like Guntakal and Gooty, the heated air would waft in. Kerala then was a relief from the heat. Last month, when I went there, I found that it too was a furnace, and in addition there was the humidity, making it even worse. But I am not sure if it was any cooler earlier either or just that I tolerated it better. Whenever we look back at the weather, the present is inevitably the worst. No one sees a downpour and says 20 years ago it used to rain more than this. What’s endured at the moment sets the record.</p>
<p>Before an age of air-conditioning or motor transport, travellers to India from colder countries, who must have inched through on foot or carts, do not describe the heat with any great distaste. We must exclude the British here, but only of a later vintage. Once they turned colonisers, their demands of what they thought they deserved as owners of the land increased, including a pleasant cold. And hence their carving out of hill stations and winter capitals, whereas as traders they just dropped their overcoats for tunics and sweltered without complaining. So also with Babar, who hated the Indian climate but only after he became ruler and fondly began to reminisce about the salubriousness of Central Asia that he had left behind. Summers are fine so long as there is a kingdom to be won.</p>
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<p>Before an age of air-conditioning or motor transport, travellers to India from colder countries do not describe the heat with any great distaste</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ibn Battuta, who came in the mid-14th century, crossed over to the town in Sind that is now known as Sehwan. One of the things he mentions is being offered a lizard stuffed with curcuma. An intrepid traveller, he however drew the line at eating lizards and refused it. The other thing he mentions of Sehwan is the heat. He wrote, ‘We entered Siwasitan during the hottest period of the summer. The heat was intense, and my companions used to sit naked except for a cloth round the waist and another soaked with water on their shoulders; this dried in a very short time and they had to keep constantly wetting it again.’ Marco Polo, commenting on the hot season in Malabar where he spent some time, relished it. ‘You must know that the heat here is sometimes so great that ‘tis something wonderful. And rain falls only for three months in the year, viz. in June, July, and August. Indeed but for the rain that falls in these three months, refreshing the earth and cooling the air, the drought would be so great that no one could exist.’ He then went on to note some peculiarities of life that the hot season brought out: ‘The men of this country have their beds made of very light canework, so arranged that, when they have got in and are going to sleep, they are drawn up by cords nearly to the ceiling and fixed there for the night. This is done to get out of the way of tarantulas which give terrible bites, as well as of fleas and such vermin, and at the same time to get as much air as possible in the great heat which prevails in that region. Not that everybody does this, but only the nobles and great folks, for the others sleep on the streets.’</p>
<p>Someone travelling in India during Chandragupta Maurya’s time would notice that summer was when the state decided to up the inventory of its most important animal. Kautilya writes in the Arthashastra: ‘Only those elephants whose physical characteristics and behaviour are judged excellent by elephant trainers shall be caught. Summer is the time to catch them.’</p>
<p>Monsoon was not seen as a separate season and it held more fascination because that is when the weather truly becomes an indomitable force. Without tarred roads, the subcontinent came to a full stop. The Greek historian Megasthenes, who lived from 350 to 290 BCE and was an ambassador to the Mauryan kingdom, saw it thus: ‘Rain falls in India during the summer, especially on the mountains Parapamisos and Emodos and the range of Imaos, and the rivers which issue from these are large and muddy. Rain during the same season falls also on the plains of India, so that much of the country is submerged: and indeed the army of Alexander was obliged at the time of midsummer to retreat in haste from the Akensines, because its waters overflowed the adjacent plains.’</p>
<p>To travel in the summer today in India is not the optimum way to go. I remember being in Goa a decade ago in peak summer and seeing my nose go red and its skin peel off from the heat. Just about the only places you would want to be are hill stations or tiger reserves because the probability of seeing a tiger increases manifold and that is always worth it. On the other hand, summer is cheaper to travel in. Hotels come at half prices because demand is less. This is the perpetual condition of the urban middle-class, craving luxury but unable to afford it and whose aspiration leads to a second market, where an inferior form of the same experience is offered cheap. Consider, however, if you were a rich trader leading a caravan or a monk in a retinue with an edict from a foreign emperor travelling in an era of scattered kingdoms where the rule of law stops at the city walls, and having to traverse highways that run through forests where bandits wait for just someone like you. What you would want is for the day to be bright and long, and nights that end in a blink.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Heat.jpg?itok=n0nCCaS3" /><div>BY: Madhavankutty Pillai</div><div>Node Id: 24277</div>Thu, 03 May 2018 16:36:34 +0000vijayopen24277 at http://www.openthemagazine.comLawrence Osborne: ‘Sensuality drives everything in travel’http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/travel-issue-2018/lawrence-osborne-sensuality-drives-everything-in-travel
<p>LAWRENCE OSBORNE IS 59, but he’d clocked just 50 when a mutual friend brought him to my home for dinner one night, the first of many meals my wife cooked for him. A tall Englishman who left his shirt-front largely unbuttoned, he supped with notable gusto (he was always “starving”) and had a mad laugh that was a mimic’s delight. He told everyone he was a novelist, and he certainly had the air and charm of one (along with an actual, if forgotten, novel published in 1986). But he was more widely known as a travel writer, living off commissions from glossy magazines that sent him first-class to a host of enviable destinations. In 2011, he published <em>Bangkok Days</em>, an uninhibited account of a visit to the Thai capital, where he’d gone as a ‘dental tourist’ to get his teeth fixed cheaply but ended up having his mind blown by the city’s attractions. Soon after that book was done, he fled New York, telling his friends that America’s sterility was killing him. There followed a short stint in Istanbul, where he wrote in an old house atop a hill, before he moved to Bangkok. He lives there serenely and writes like a fiend. He has written four novels in the last five years, <em>The Forgiven</em>—from 2013—being particularly lauded. He’s also resurrected Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s private investigator, in a novel to be published in July. I caught up with Osborne by email—he in Bangkok, I in Brooklyn—and the following friendly conversation ensued.</p>
<p><strong>Lawrence, you’re a writer who travels—a ‘travel writer’, even. Do you like the term? Is it useful, or is it hackneyed?</strong></p>
<p>I think it’s a dated term which no longer holds much appeal, not to me anyway. We no longer live in the world of Eric Ambler or Norman Lewis, or even Bruce Chatwin. I suppose you could walk from London to Istanbul like Patrick Leigh Fermor did, but today it would just be a stunt and it wouldn’t be particularly interesting. Would you like to walk across Bulgaria? I don’t think I would. The world has been changed by its transportation systems and its cultures thrown together by the medias we all share. My last ‘travel piece’ was for the <em>New Yorker</em> back in 2005, for whom I trudged across forests in Irian Jaya. That was radical travel of a sort, but I was never quite sure how authentic it all was. I was glad to see the Kombai tribe’s culture close- up, but I was almost sad to have to write about it in a magazine as glib as the <em>New Yorker</em>. I think it was then that I decided to drop the idea of ‘travel writing’ and just concentrate on travelling, so to speak, through my own worlds—in fiction.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘We are a migratory species. We like to wander the earth and find out what other humans are up to’</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Is the problem that writing—like travel itself— has become something that too many people do? Is it possible to say that travel, like writing, actually requires a certain talent?</strong></p>
<p>That’s an interesting, if heretical, observation. But yes, travel requires maybe even more talent than writing, as shown by how few people can actually do it with the requisite originality. I am far from excusing myself in that regard. I have become a tremendously irritable, contemptuous, harried traveller, constantly cursing my fellow travellers, who are of course just vacationers, not travellers, and increasingly isolated inside my own need to be alone, to have a comfortable spot, to not be submerged in the vast Chinese tour groups who now make moving around even Thailand a torment. Naturally, I have a fair point. The whole thing has become a farce.</p>
<p><strong>How do you differentiate ‘vacation’ from ‘travel’?</strong></p>
<p>As Paul Bowles used to say, more or less, the vacationer is just passing through, the traveller comes to stay... for a while at least</p>
<p><strong>So, when you travel to a place, you seek to ‘stay’ in some way. I assume that means immersing yourself in the place, becoming a part of it. What are the things you do to make that happen... to belong?</strong></p>
<p>I would say that it is quite a mysterious desire, to linger like that—it would certainly be easy to caricature it as ‘orientalist’—a stupid phrase derived, in my opinion, from a mediocre book. Whenever people start droning on about ‘orientalism’, I refer to them to the brilliant counter-argument of the scholar Ibn Warraq, who demolishes Edward Said quite easily. No, the desire to linger outside of your own culture is hardly a reprehensible thing; it’s a gesture of the imagination which reaches out to the human communality. I find it more enigmatic and subtle than one might think. I have no idea why I feel ‘at home’, for example, in Southeast Asia, or Japan, whereas I detest California, the south of France and Surrey. Do I not have the liberty to make such elective choices, which in the end come down to temperament and sensibility? Some would say not. But to hell with them, it’s my life and I can spend it as and where I wish. We are a migratory species. We like to wander the earth and find out what other humans, probably as awful as ourselves, are up to.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Travel requires even more talent than writing’</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Let me press you on that last answer. Why exactly do you feel at home in Southeast Asia? After all, you’ve lived in Bangkok for some five years now. You used to call New York home, but you fled from there to Bangkok. You must have known what was awaiting you, and also what you were fleeing from.</strong></p>
<p>I had a rather clear idea, but then again I found that I didn’t know Thailand quite as well as I thought I did. As soon as I arrived, there was a military coup. But every society has its dark side, and Thailand is no exception. That’s the human equation. I certainly knew what I was leaving in New York—an increasingly unliveable, insanely expensive mad-house. But that’s just my view of it after living there for 20 years. I think it’s a young person’s city. Past a certain age, it’s just exhausting and not very pleasurable. You know, eventually you have to live where it’s pleasurable for you—it’s not a frivolous demand, when you think about it. I often wonder if I like Asia because people have better manners and, on an interpersonal level, more consideration for others; plenty of garrulous expats will snort and stamp their feet if you say this, but then why are they not living in their homelands if they feel this way?</p>
<p>I realise I am not working-class Thai, living in a slum—but then, nor are most Thais. We are seeing the emergence of relatively sophisticated societies all over the world which in the end are not particularly exotic when it comes to day-to-day life. I don’t walk around in a sarong all day and eat off banana leaves—I go to my local espresso bar and eat croissants and drive my motorbike to a luxury mall. It’s not a postcard from the ‘developing world’. I hate that phrase, too, by the way. In many ways, I find Bangkok more sophisticated than some aspects of New York. I think more and more people will realise this when they actually get out of their Western bubble and live elsewhere. They won’t, of course. But as Buddha says, look to your own salvation, not that of others. I think he says that, anyway.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘The vacationer is just passing through, the traveller comes to stay’</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Is travel—and, by extension, living—about salvation? It used to be about adventure once upon a time. Or is adventure overrated?</strong></p>
<p>Adventure is for adolescents. Salvation, on the other hand, is an adult’s life-work. I have no desire whatsoever for adventures at this point of my life. I go to Mongolia whenever I can to get in some horse-riding and archery, but not because it’s adventurous—it isn’t particularly. I just enjoy the Gobi and firing missiles at straw targets!</p>
<p><strong>Tell me about the things that make you love a place, that pave the way to salvation. Food? Drink? Language? Local people?</strong></p>
<p>One’s own preferences are not logical or obvious to oneself. Maybe it’s things we are not entirely conscious of: climate; the subtle effects of a cuisine; a sexual or aesthetic thing; or else how you are able to live day to day. If you look at the world only politically, you may as well stay home and go on marches. Inexcusably or not, it’s not my thing. I wouldn’t go on marches anyway. Most of what we call ‘politics’ is nothing of the sort. It’s way more pathological and preening than we’d care to admit. And then, the writer—being alone with no resources—has other concerns. Silence, exile, cunning, and all that. I have no family money, no back-up—I have to survive on my wits, and always did. Most writers— most leftists too—come from the upper-middle- class and don’t have this problem. For me, it’s a severe one. So, inevitably, I will gravitate to a place where I can stop worrying about how to survive and make rent. I decided I wanted to write novels without interruption and living in a place like London is out of the question now, as far as that is concerned. So perhaps these mundane considerations have added to the charm of a place like Bangkok. However, in the end, these are animal decisions, not really intellectual ones. I’m not trying to make some abstract point; I’m trying to have a platform upon which I can devote myself to the art I’ve chosen. It sounds a little precious, I know, but that’s just the fact of the matter. And then, there are moments almost every day here where I feel the beautiful spirit of the place—a thousand intangible things which remind me of how much I enjoy living here day by day. The everyday dabs of human beauty (and ugliness).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Adventure is for adolescents. Salvation is an adult’s life work’</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>And sensuality?</strong></p>
<p>I think sensuality drives everything in travel, and always has done. Not always consciously, but usually consciously. We just don’t want to talk about it publicly. The most sensual places are invariably the places where you are attracted to people sexually, despite all the other contingencies. For me—and I don’t want to have to explain the whys, because I can’t—that would be India, the Middle East, Southeast and East Asia. The rest of the world, strangely, has no sensuality for me. Perhaps I should try psychoanalysis.</p>
<p><strong>Is Thailand the most ‘liveable’ place you’ve been—and Bangkok the most ‘liveable’ city? And while I’m at it: may I ask if you find the West unliveable-in for reasons other than expense and high cost? Do you have aesthetic objections to the Western life that’s currently on offer?</strong></p>
<p>‘Liveable’ is a relative term. It depends on which city, which neighbourhood, which friends you have, and so on. But yes, for me personally it is the case. And it’s not just a question of costs—Bangkok is not especially cheap these days, alas.</p>
<p>As for the Western lifestyle, I think it’s becoming less and less appealing—when you consider the strange paradoxes of a country like Britain, a pioneer of democracy descending into a sort of surveillance nanny state. Yes, Thailand is that too, but the surveillance is so incompetent and half-hearted that you are just left alone and the concept of a nanny state isn’t nearly as effective. The military just aren’t that good at it. Bangkok is delightful anarchy compared to the anal ‘health and safety’ manias of contemporary Britain. But perhaps that’s how the British like it. It’s been said that Britain is a country where everything is policed except crime itself. Here in Bangkok, the authorities are always trying to ‘clean up’ this and that (street food, night life, etcetera ), but they never seem to succeed very well. Many people lament this. Not me. There’s more vibrant street life within four blocks of where I live than in the whole of Brooklyn. And so it’s easier for someone like me to be alone.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘When I’ve been in India it has been for things I’ve wanted to ‘submerge’ into’</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>What draws you to Japan, of which you’ve written so much?</strong></p>
<p>For me, Japan is a special place. I am married into a Japanese family via my son, so I am seen as a ‘<em>giri no Otosan</em>’ (father-in-law) there and the word ‘<em>giri</em>’ in Japanese implies some kind of social responsibility—which is reciprocated by respect for the young. Japan respects age and the old. Youth-culture tyranny is vile and fascistic. Japan has a youth culture, but it also has an age culture. That is why they live longer than anyone on earth. All the criticisms one reads of Japan (almost entirely written by Western journalists, I might add) never manage to see ‘around’ the whole culture—which has vertical depth in vast abundance. Only Japanese has a word for ‘the effects of sunlight filtering through trees’—<em>komorebi</em> —or a concept like <em>wabi-sabi</em>, originally derived from a word for loneliness and now meaning the melancholy that emanates from objects made beautifully imperfect by time.</p>
<p>Of course, they have ‘speedu freaku’ as well, but that is the wonderful syncretism of a culture which is otherwise homogenous. But in Japan the homogeneity never seems sterile to me, as it does in some other places. I love the mad pursuit of artisanal perfection, the way thousands of tiny, exquisite retail spaces are piled up in equally tiny streets but without confusion or squalor. I love the respect people have for their own work, and the near total absence of crime. The way, after Fukushima and the deaths of thousands of people, people lined up patiently for water and committed not a single act of looting. Yes, it’s overcrowded, neurotic, marred by horrible modern development, and quirky. But I fall for its fading glamour and its highly literate and refined culture— which you can see in its cinematic masterpieces. Are there any films greater and more profound that those of Ozu, Mitzugouchi, Kurosawa and Kobayashi? Not on my planet. And even in contemporary cinema, I am a great follower of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Kitano, Yoji Yamada and the new young director Kei Ichikawa. Those are my reasons—we’ll talk about the world’s best food another time.</p>
<p><strong>And India? You’ve been there often. How do you regard it as a place to be in—its people, its ways, its foibles?</strong></p>
<p>Well, India is emotionally complicated for us English, for so many reasons. I have more Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi friends than Thai in the literary area—the relationship is intellectually closer. When I’ve been in India it has been for things I’ve wanted to ‘submerge’ into, whether it be the Ajanta caves or the temples around Somnathpur or the Andaman Islands, a place I love. I love Calcutta and go there when I can, since it’s only two hours away from Bangkok. I have a great fondness for Leh and Ladakh. But on the subject of mangoes we will probably have to agree to disagree on the relative merits of the Thai and Indian versions.</p>
<p><strong>I’m not going there! But, do the English and the Indians have a special affinity for each other?</strong></p>
<p>Yes, they do. Their relationship to the written word is very similar, for one thing; how else would Indian writers have entered the British canon so majestically? It’s very possible that the British were as much transformed by India as the other way around. I’ve always wondered—perhaps whimsically—if there are subconscious reasons that I like the Buddhist- Hindu mix in Thailand (whose king, let’s recall, is an incarnation of Vishnu). At the very least, you can say that the British psyche, to put it a certain way, has been altered by the Hindu world, and is consequently rather open to it. We have always thought India was a little special in some indefinable way, and many of us still think that.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Sensuality.jpg?itok=ZPzYXuMk" /><div>BY: Tunku Varadarajan</div><div>Node Id: 24273</div>Thu, 03 May 2018 15:18:00 +0000vijayopen24273 at http://www.openthemagazine.comFootloose in Hokkaidohttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/travel-issue-2018/footloose-in-hokkaido
<p>AT FIRST, THERE was silence. An open expanse of snow was all that could be seen for miles on either side of the narrow ledge we’d been allowed to stand on. Photographers from around the world crouched, their cameras switched on, their lenses ready, their eyes glazed in both anticipation and the cold. The temperature was around minus 4 degree Celsius and there was little to protect our faces from the biting wind. Every few minutes, the need to brush away condensed snow would take over, and I’d do so quickly, not wanting to miss the spectacle we’d been waiting over an hour for.</p>
<p>The sweeping noise caught us all off-guard. In under thirty seconds, nearly 300 red-crowned cranes appeared over the horizon and in a brilliantly coordinated show, every one of them swooped down onto the field before us. The cranes had arrived for their afternoon feeding at the Akan Observation Centre in Kushiro. All throughout the harsh winter months of Hokkaido, where temperatures can plunge to below 15 degree Celsius, this field is home, playground and the future for these birds.</p>
<p>The Tancho, or the red-crowned crane, has been a symbol of longevity and good luck in Japan for millennia. With its long white neck and torso, jet black legs and a crimson cap on its head, this is the second rarest crane species in the world. In Hokkaido itself, despite its fabled status, there were less than 40 of these birds left in the wild in the 1940s due to the destruction of the natural wetlands where they hunted for food in the winter. Being more nomadic than migratory, the cranes don’t have the ability to fly south, preferring instead to move around the different wetlands on Hokkaido in their hunt for grain, reeds, small amphibians and insects.</p>
<p>In 1950, with the birds on the brink of extinction, one man in Akan decided to give the cranes access to his corn fields. Sadajiro Yamazaki, now known as the ‘steward of Kushiro marsh’, was the first man to artificially feed the Tancho in the wild. Since then, his land has been converted into a feeding ground, observatory, breeding facility and crane research centre. The resident Tancho population in Hokkaido is now close to 1,000. Yamazaki not only saved these majestic birds from extinction, he also brought their ritual romantic dances to the attention of the world’s media. Every year, hundreds of postcards, posters, calendars, clothing and photographs of the Tancho make their way to markets across South East Asia.</p>
<p>Today, with the winter slowly retreating and the sun making its presence felt once more on Japan’s northern- most island, the joy of these birds is palpable. Their bellies full of corn, the birds gather in pairs to announce the arrival of spring with their partners. The dance we see is one that they will perform several times over the coming years, to strengthen their lifelong bond, to pledge themselves to each other through nothing more than movement, touch and sound. First, there is a piercing cry to signal that the dance has begun. The cranes then bow to each other, and, throwing their heads back in unison, they bow once again. They prance and hop, facing one another, and then throw themselves up into the air at the exact same second, their wings spread wide, their beaks shimmering like yellow spears. They do this again and again, till all around us, each pair begins to look like a single giant black and white butterfly, flittering around in the snowy gust. After around ten minutes, the Tancho who had been lucky enough to share this moment with someone special, return to their food, leaving the rest, who had been silent spectators, to sulkily preen themselves (the ardent dance had clearly ruffled some feathers).</p>
<p>“The sight of the Tancho, even just its shadow over the snow, was like an affirmation that life and beauty still exists when you haven’t seen proper sunshine or a sign of life for weeks on end,” says Shinriki, an elderly male member of the Ainu tribe. The Ainu were the original inhabitants of northern Japan, especially Hokkaido which is believed to once have been part of mainland Russia before it got separated by the sea (today, Russia is only a 20-minute boat ride away from the northern parts of Hokkaido). The Ainu began trading with the Japanese from Honshu in the 1600s. However, they were only given recognition as an indigenous Japanese tribe in 2008. Today, there are around 25,000 Ainu left in Hokkaido and many see themselves as protectors of the region’s ancient customs and beliefs.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Fishing on lake Akan happens both in summer and winter. The lake, which is known for its giant balls of green algae, freezes in the winter months</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Catch!” says a loud voice behind me. I turn around and find a large orange disc being hurled in my direction. I bend down and my fingers clasp the edges of what turns out to be a ceramic plate just in time. When I stand up, I find myself in the middle of a circle of ten young Ainu women. They are all in traditional attire— ankle-length, full-sleeved dresses (almost like a <em>kaftan</em>) with geometric prints, a headband to hold back their jet black hair and a simple neckpiece made of local stones. “Let’s play,” says one of them to me. And they all begin tossing plates at me, one after the other. Each time they throw, they twirl around, hold out one leg and then gracefully touch their toes. The object of this little ‘plate dance’, I soon discover, is to catch as many plates as I can. However, the women don’t throw the plates when you expect them to, they will twirl and dance and pretend to throw several times, till you suddenly find a huge disk coming straight for your face. I caught four before the fifth crashed and shattered into pieces. One woman tied together the shards for me with some string; it was now a belt. “Even in despair, one can find something beautiful,” she mumbles in broken English.</p>
<p>This, as I go on to learn during my three-day stay at Lake Akan, an onsen or hot spring town in central Hokkaido, is the philosophy for all life on this island. Even when food is scarce, travel halts, water pipes freeze and everything is snowbound, people and animals find ways to keep themselves going. This is evident in the way the eagles practise catching food by tossing a dead mouse to one another on a dark, misty morning. It can be seen in the ice carnivals and fairs held in every village. It is there in the origami crane (with wings that flap when you pull on its tail) that a stranger will hand you at a bus stop because you look like you could do with a paper bird to play with while you wait for transport that shows up only once every four hours.</p>
<p>“If you cannot embrace the goodness of life, it will pass you by as you sit and complain,” says Shinriki, as we share cups of green tea and sandwiches. One of them turns out to be preserved bear meat, another has salted squid guts and the third, dried salmon. I eat them all. Shinriki is delighted because Western tourists usually turn everything down except salmon. “Hunting is strictly regulated to ensure sustainability. Females and kids are never touched and it’s only for a short season. It is a fair hunt. The animal dies an instant death if caught. It is nothing compared to the life of torture and misery that farm animals in the West endure, being bred only for death and waiting in line to have their heads chopped off,” he says. Put this way, I didn’t feel too bad helping myself to a second salted squid stomach toastie.</p>
<p>On my last day, my phone stops working. I am later told that there is a magnetic pull in the area that can be fatal for some models. With no alarm clock, Google Translate and limited access to an English-speaking person, I feel lonelier than I have ever been in my life. The idea of being in a remote northern Japanese village, slowly begins to lose all appeal. Shinriki tries to cheer me up with a fishing and snowmobile riding expedition. It is an intensely cold morning, the sun having gone back into hiding and I am reluctant at first to venture out. But with nothing to do except wait for my flight to Tokyo the next morning, I eventually give in.</p>
<p>Fishing on lake Akan happens both in summer and winter. The lake, which is known for its giant balls of green algae, freezes completely in the winter months. Holes are dug and temporary sheds constructed for the enthusiastic angler. After slipping nearby and banging my head on the ice, I am now crawling around inside the shed on all fours, much to the amusement of my Ainu companions. It doesn’t help that when it’s time to skewer live worms onto hooks, I squeal and drop three before finally hooking one. Shinriki then hands me a scissor to slice the worms in half, for the smell of fresh blood will attract more fish. All of us drop our hooks into the icy water. Every minute, we have to lift the rod slightly three times in a row and then stop. This is to test for the weight of a fish. When we reel the line in, I am the only one without a catch.</p>
<p>Snowmobile riding doesn’t make things better. I step into water on my way to the tent where the helmets are kept. Now my sneakers are soaking wet. Cold and cross, I don’t think twice before pressing the accelerator on the snowmobile. I am pushed with so much momentum that I all but fly off my seat. Shinriki arrives to put a seat belt around me, hand me a pair of gloves and offer me a change of shoes. It is hard to feel unhappy in the presence of so much thoughtfulness. “The Ainu are known for being resilient. When we were persecuted by the mainlanders, not given formal recognition, looked down upon in society, we stuck together and persevered. Today, the young Ainu might not know as much about our hard history, but we still teach them basic culture, including our music and dance and tapestry weaving,” says Shinriki, as we ride past Mount Akan, one of the volcanoes located in the region’s active volcano belt. After 30 minutes of driving towards the edge of the lake, Shinriki gestures for me to pull over. And there, at the edge of a lake that was responsible for short-circuiting my phone, with my lips frozen and my eyes glistening from the ever-present cold, I see one of the island’s rarest winter phenomenon: frost flowers. These extremely delicate ice formations happen only when winds are minimal and conditions cold. “Always something beautiful can be found, if you look for it,” Shinriki reminds me.</p>
<p>Before I leave, the island has one last experience in store for me. A visit to the Akan onsen. The water is sourced directly from underground thermal springs and are visited by people from across the world for its restorative properties.</p>
<p>The onsen rules are strict. No clothes are allowed and nobody with a tattoo may enter the hot springs (the public display of tattoos was banned years ago, taken as it once was as a sign of belonging to an unsavoury gang). To stand naked in sub-zero conditions under the open sky with a frozen lake and an active volcano right in front of you isn’t nearly as relaxing as I thought it would be. Instead, it is deeply unnerving. I feel adrenaline rush through my body and my heartbeat increase as the contrast of hot water and cold air meets my skin to form goosebumps under the dark sky. In one last show of its majesty, Hokkaido rains diamond dust down on me. Flakes of snow, glistening like tiny solitaires, come descending from above. On Hokkaido island, disaster and miracle are truly never too far apart.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Dancingcranes1.jpg?itok=exVIVsXo" /><div>BY: Sonali Acharjee</div><div>Node Id: 24272</div>Thu, 03 May 2018 13:10:09 +0000vijayopen24272 at http://www.openthemagazine.comThe Old New Hanoihttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/travel-issue-2018/the-old-new-hanoi
<p>SO WHAT DO you do when you land at Vietnam? You can sense the air is heavy with both urbanisation and the memories of war. Well, you start drifting, imagining and feeling the place. You start creating your own understanding and you are changed by what you see.</p>
<p>Vietnam, having been cut off from modernity for almost two decades, is now in a rush trying to make up for lost time. But it still retains its old flavour, rustic charm, now infused by a groovy cool. The streets are packed with plush restaurants, yet most people enjoy sitting around on plastic stools, hunched over steaming bowls of <em>pho</em> and beer. Then there are places like Hoi An, a vibrant colourful town with its covered bridges and quiet shrines, which recall a time when Vietnam was bustling with Chinese and Japanese merchants. Motorbikes and cars are banned here, and you can only explore it the traditional way—afloat or by cycle.</p>
<p>What makes Vietnam special is its relationship with its history. Its museums have preserved its dark days, so that ‘we don’t forget’. We ‘experience’ war in the museums, we don’t just observe it.</p>
<p>To visit this country is to be invigorated by the old and the new. A spirited people, they have weathered the fiercest of storms and are going strong.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Hanoi1.jpg?itok=YU1lJyTG" /><div>BY: Text and Photographs by Ashish Sharma</div><div>Node Id: 24271</div>Thu, 03 May 2018 10:17:20 +0000vijayopen24271 at http://www.openthemagazine.comOn the Road from Istanbul to Antalyahttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/travel-issue-2018/on-the-road-from-istanbul-to-antalya
<p>AFTER A FANTASTIC meal on board my Turkish Airlines flight from Mumbai to Istanbul, I asked Eylül, the flight attendant who was looking after me, for a cup of tea. She brought it in a dainty little glass without any milk. When I asked her for some milk, she told me to trust her and have it as it is, without milk.</p>
<p>“Not only is it refreshing, it is the true taste of Turkey” she smiled.</p>
<p>And she was right. On my two-week long road trip, I would often stop for a cup of <em>çay</em> and it would truly refresh me. Amongst the many teas in Turkey, Doğuş has become my favourite. Of course, over the course of my trip I have come to realise that besides tea, <em>katmer</em> (wafer thin pastry stuffed with cheese, sugar or tahini), Adana kebap, grilled liver, baklava and <em>kaymak</em> (thick clotted cream) are also the tastes of Turkey that I have come to love, but that is a different story.</p>
<p>During a conversation with Eylül on the flight, I mentioned that I was doing a road trip in Turkey because the beauty of such a journey is that you can take your time and follow your heart.</p>
<p>“The problem you will face” she replied, “is that my pretty country will pull your heart all over the place.”</p>
<p>And again she was right. So here is the story of how Turkey tugged at my heart in the two weeks that I spent driving from Istanbul to Antalya via its western coast.</p>
<p>Istanbul is an amalgamation of waterways, continents and cultures that have passed through or flourished in this city that straddles the continents of Europe and Asia. A city that celebrates its past as it continues to stride ahead, its skyline is dominated by minarets and telecom towers.</p>
<p>I was staying at the Shangri La Bosphorus that is located in the Beşiktaş neighbourhood, and that evening hopped on to a ferry from the Ferry Terminal Beşiktaş (IDO). Though my final destination was Sariyer, the ferry sort of zigzagged across the Bosphorus, stopping at various points before arriving at Sariyer after an hour and 40 minutes. The ferries that ply the Bosphorus are truly the lifelines of this vibrant city and it is a great place to get a perspective of Istanbul by watching the sights as they go by and also the passengers. I did do the usual tourist trample: Topkapi Palace, Sultanahmet, the Hagia Sophia Museum and Taksim Square and the Spice Market, but it was the sunset ferry ride that endeared Istanbul to me.</p>
<p>A few years ago, when I was driving in Delhi, I came across the road on which the Delhi Race Club is located. The road is called Mustafa Kemal Atatürk Road. I vaguely knew that he was the founder of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. But there must be some greatness to warrant a road named after him in India. And to truly learn about Atatürk, one has to go to Gallipoli.</p>
<p>We started our Turkish road trip by driving the 328 km from Istanbul to the lovely seaside town of Çanakkale from where the Gallipoli peninsula is just a 20-minute ferry ride away.</p>
<p>The site of some of the harshest fighting during World War I, Gallipoli was a resounding slap in the face to the British and especially Winston Churchill, who displayed supreme arrogance and ignorance with regards to how far the Turks would go to protect their land against an invading force.</p>
<p>When the World War had reached a stalemate on the Western Front thanks to trench warfare, Churchill who was a cabinet minister at that time fomented a pompous plan to sail old British battleships up the Dardanelles Straits into the Sea of Marmara and take Istanbul, thus clearing the way for Britain’s ally Russia to sail its ships from its ports on the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. With the typical disdain that the White man had for the east during that period, he discredited the fact that Turks knew how to defend their land.</p>
<p>Mines and land batteries knocked out the battleships and so the British decided to land troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula to neutralise the land batteries. For this, they chose troops from Australia and New Zealand and India. Once again, the Turkish Army prevailed, thanks to Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal’s policy of fighting to the death. At one of the battles that he was leading from the front, he was hit in the chest by a piece of shrapnel, but his pocket watch saved his life. It was his leadership of the 19th Division of the Turkish Army that was largely responsible for kicking the allies off the Gallipoli Peninsula and earned him the title of the Saviour of Istanbul. It made him a hero among Turks and eventually their ruler.</p>
<p>Eight years later, when Atatürk founded the Secular Republic of Turkey, he brought about the rapid modernisation of the country through revolutionary social and political reforms to give Turkey a shining new identity outside the shadow of the medieval Ottoman Empire. One of his most ardent reforms was the emancipation of women.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Turkey, with its liberal lifestyle and deep respect for culture and moral values, was like a breath of fresh air, especially given its geographical location and eastern neighbours</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To me, Turkey, with its liberal lifestyle and deep respect for culture and moral values, was like a breath of fresh air, especially given its geographical location and eastern neighbours. Men and women here are happy and friendly, there is music in the air and hospitality is a way of life. It is because of Atatürk’s reforms that Turkey is the most modern Muslim-majority country in the world, one where the rights of women are championed.</p>
<p>That day we spent driving around the peninsula, starting off with a visit to the spanking new Gallipoli Simulation Centre (Çannakale Destanı Tanıtım Merkezi) was quite a heart-warming experience because people from all over the world, including Turks, come here to pay homage at the many memorials and applaud the courage, endurance and camaraderie of the soldiers who fought and died there on both sides. In 1937, in a masterstroke of reconciliation, Atatürk sent a letter to Australia and New Zealand saying that the mothers who had lost their sons at Gallipoli should wipe away their tears as their sons who lie at Gallipoli are now sons of the Turkish people too.</p>
<p>If you are ever there, go to the little seaside cemetery of Ariburnu, where at the far corner by the sea are three tablets to honour the memory of Allah Ditta, Hussain Khan and Iman Din, soldiers of the Indian army who died there.</p>
<p>Driving on from Çanakkale, it became clear to me that Turkey is a country meant for road tripping. My Nissan X-Trail was on song on the smooth roads south towards Izmir. On the way, we stopped at the excavation site of a city that for years people thought existed only in mythology and Homer’s <em>Iliad</em>, Troy. From there, we cut off the main road to visit the mountain top citadel of Assos, a Greek city dating back to the 10th century BCE and excavated in 1981.</p>
<p>I absolutely loved Izmir because of its Kemeraltı Çarşısı, the historical bazaar district and delightful food within. We were fortunate to have Celaleddin Arpat, an Izmir local who is passionate about food, showing us around this liveliest part of the city. That day remains a delicious delight as we sampled <em>kaymak</em> with honey, <em>katmer</em>, fried liver, cold cuts wrap, assorted sweetmeats, <em>kokoreç</em> (grilled lamb intestines) and <em>börek</em> and <em>boyoz</em>. We must have consumed 3,000 calories but we also walked 14,000 steps that day.</p>
<p>Ephesus, 80 km south of Izmir, offers among the greatest ruins of a city you’ll ever visit. Very little imagination is needed to visualise how it would have been in its heyday (2,200 years ago); this is largely due to the fact that the river and eventually the city silted up and was abandoned, which is how it was kept hidden and preserved. The theatres, the harbour street, the magnificent Library of Celsus and Temple of Hadrian are all works of art that have survived largely intact. A Greek city was first built here in 1000 BCE, but what can be seen today was founded by Alexander the Cursed’s successor, Lysimachus. But the Romans elevated this city to the chief port on the Aegean Sea.</p>
<p>Ephesus is often the highlight of package tours in Turkey, so it is best to arrive here early in the day (at opening hour if possible).</p>
<p>Close by, 9 km to the southwest is Meryem Ana Gişesi or the House of the Virgin Mary. After the crucifixion of Jesus, it is believed that Virgin Mary came and spent her remaining days at this house. It is an important place of pilgrimage in the Christian world and a very peaceful place to visit.</p>
<p>Blue was the keyword as we headed down the coast. This region is called the Turquoise Coast and it is most apparent at Oludeniz and the Butterfly Valley. Touted as one of the best beaches in Turkey and the world, on a clear day the water at Oludeniz Beach is a deep turquoise and with the high mountains surrounding it, this is a premier paragliding location.</p>
<p>But the prettier beach is the one at Butterfly Valley, accessible by a 25-minute boat ride from Oludeniz or a treacherous downhill trek from the main road. The short trek from the beach to the waterfall is easy and if one is patient, colourful butterflies and giant tortoises can be spotted.</p>
<p>A little known fact is that there are more Greek ruins in Turkey than in Greece itself, and if history and ruins are your thing, like they are mine, then there is a lovely 156 km circuit from Oludeniz to Kaştaking in Tlos, Pinara, Letoon and Patara.</p>
<p>These are certainly not on the usual tourist map and quite a slog to visit if you don’t have your own wheels. But it is a magical circuit. The ruins are never crowded and serenely located. We were the only ones at Pinara. And the amphitheatres at Tlos, Pinara and Letoon are incredibly well preserved. The location of the one at Pinara under the snow-capped Taurus Mountains is breathtaking.</p>
<p>At Tlos, Ebrahim, a local shepherd boy, took me on a walk over the rubble of centuries past and showed me signs carved into the stones. One was of two serpents and a chalice representing an apothecary, another was of happy and sad faces representing the theatre, and yet another was one of an eagle—the Roman emblem.</p>
<p>At Pinara, the man at the ticket office asked me to try spotting the phallic symbol carved by the builders as a joke into one of the steps leading to the temple of Aphrodite, the Goddess of love, beauty and procreation.</p>
<p>During this drive, we stopped at a little roadside inn attached to a home for lunch and were served çay and <em>gözlemes</em> (Turkish pancake) by Khadriye, a local girl making the pancakes over a wood fire. She might have been making <em>gözlemes</em> over a wood fire in a village, but the half an hour I spent talking to her over cups of <em>çay</em> was like a hammam for my mind. It was one of those impromptu interactions that make road travel so special. Curious without being inquisitive and opinionated without being obtuse, Khadriye was well informed with a subtle sense of humour and an air of confidence; and also, in my opinion, the epitome of the modern Turkey that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk envisioned 94 years ago.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Abentinhistory1_0.jpg?itok=RvVrh7Bf" /><div>BY: Rishad Saam Mehta</div><div>Node Id: 24270</div>Thu, 03 May 2018 09:48:01 +0000vijayopen24270 at http://www.openthemagazine.comThe Eternity of Returnhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/travel-issue-2018/the-eternity-of-return
<p>I ARRIVED IN KERALA in June 2016 from the US, fully prepped to begin my PhD dissertation research. One of my first visits was to a palace museum where a very nice man took upon the task of showing me around. He had been overjoyed to run into a person as interested as he was in local history. We talked for over an hour about the Travancore royal family, the history of subaltern reform movements, the sad state of museums in Kerala and so on. When he learned that my dissertation was on Kerala’s pre-modern art, he whipped out his cell phone (ringtone set to KJ Yesudas lovingly serenading Guruvayurappan) and gave me a list of people that he thought may be of help. As we walked down the grand flight of stairs, each teak-wood tread creaking from our weight, he said, “So, you are not married.”</p>
<p>Having grown up in Kerala, I knew privacy was an overrated concept, but the comment with no question implied still surprised me. I confessed my marital status and for shock value added that I have a child. The man looked thoroughly confused.</p>
<p>Experiences like these were precisely why I had set out for my dissertation research with a sense of trepidation. I had left Kerala at 17. Actually, I had picked up my skirts and run away from the casual misogyny of the conservative small town. My family’s liberal, sometimes even feminist, values had placed me at odds with Malayalee society. I had not returned to live here in over 15 years. Studies, marriage and motherhood had kept me away, seeing less and less of Kerala as the years went by. Now I was back, living in the state full-time for half the year, for two years in a row. Kerala’s dichotomy as one of the most literate yet patriarchal states has always concerned me. How can people who appear to be so aware of the world be so closed to new ideas? How was I going to live here now, after living abroad for more than a decade, and put up with life here if I couldn’t do it at 17?</p>
<p>I came across good men (and women) like my museum guide almost every day as part of my research travels. The subtext of their comments was clear. I was breaking the unspoken Malayalee code of conduct: a girl is always highly educated, finds work after graduation, then immediately gets married, and within the next couple of years makes a baby. Then she lives happily ever after, expertly juggling a 9-to-5 job and motherhood, being a wife and a splendid cook, and all the while preferably placing her husband’s needs above hers. And here I was with a young child who was being taken from town to town across three continents, often left in the care of his grandmother, while living away from the husband for months on end—all for what? For lying under a 300-year-old bed at Padmanabhapuram Palace in Tuckalay, a town on the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border, trying to figure out how this object was put together!</p>
<p>Yet, if you can accept, at least momentarily, the Malayalee curiosity and patriarchal leanings and move ahead, you get to the good stuff.</p>
<p>The big cities in Kerala have undergone a seismic change over the last decade. Glistening malls are making their presence felt, there are more tourists out and about, and traffic in cities like Ernakulam is necessitating the construction of Metro rail lines. But beyond the bounds of these cities, a constant in Kerala is its slow- paced way of life. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the British certainly could not stand it; the 18th-century pioneer Reverend Claudius Buchanan complained that the state’s Nairs did nothing but fight wars or celebrate festivals, with its Christians learning the miserable habits of Nairs and making a mockery of their religion as well. The martial culture is now long gone, but festivals of all kinds remain.</p>
<p>Marari, a fishing village turned tourist haven in the district of Alappuzha, epitomises this laidback quality more than any other place I have visited in recent memory. The bluish-green Arabian sea is schizophrenic here. On one part of the beach, its serene beauty lies almost as still as a pool. You can walk many feet into the waves rippling around your legs, confidently searching for shells, of which there are many kinds. But walk a few yards north, across a dried-up estuary, and the sea takes on a different avatar. It roars, huge waves breaking on the sand with such threatening furore that you wonder if you imagined its placidity. In the evening locals walk by with fish they caught for dinner, little ones that you will not find in stores. Fish that look like anchovy but pack a wallop taste-wise, like fat mackerel.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The more I travelled, the more Kerala became familiar in a way that I had not experienced while I grew up here. I always knew that it was a beautiful place</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The amazing thing about Kerala, though, is that you don’t have to go to a beach to find the kind of joy one seldom finds in the bustling streets and hipster cafes that I adore so much elsewhere. (Indeed, aside from Ernakulam and Thiruvananthapuram, you will hardly find a town with a decent Café Coffee Day or Starbucks, forget hipster cafes entirely.) Starting around May (if you are lucky) and all the way into October, you can sit on any porch and cloud-watch. For when it rains in Kerala, you will find that the incessant humidity and nearly-unbearable heat was worth it.</p>
<p>Thunder in Kerala doesn’t rumble, it roars like a caged animal unleashed. And when it does, you run to unplug electric cables and then make some really hot <em>chaaya</em>.</p>
<p>It rained early this year. As it rained, my toddler who can otherwise never sit still, did not utter a word. We watched the sparks silhouetting the dancing trees until it was time for bed.</p>
<p>The more I travelled, the more Kerala became familiar in a way that I had not experienced while I grew up here. I always knew that it was a beautiful place. But it had always been a place of legends and myths, not so much history. What was made had gone back to being mud, for the Keralites of yore steadfastly used laterite and timber to construct their houses and temples, and they wrote on olas (dried Palmyra leaves)—materials that hardly have a shelf life of beyond a few hundred years.</p>
<p>Last year, in the course of my research in London, I came across a British East India Company document containing the account of Tipu Sultan’s attack on Kerala in 1789. Tipu, the fearsome king of Mysore, unleashed his armies first on the petty chiefs of North Malabar, subjugating them one by one, by sword or marriage. His great army came to the northern borders of Travancore and Cochin, and here they encountered the rampart called Nedumkotta, a line of fortifications that stretched from the Arabian Sea to the Western Ghats. Nedumkotta impeded Tipu temporarily, and it is said that when he returned, he destroyed the Lines, blasting it from east to west out of pure spite.</p>
<p>I wanted to see if there was anything left of Nedumkotta. So I gathered together my young octogenarian grandmother, mother, and my son, and set off along National Highway 544. We eventually found what is called the Konoor gate, the first entry point of the Mysorean army. We climbed the steep mound which was all that was left of the Lines. Amidst the undergrowth, there are still huge granite slabs that may have been the roof of sepoy hideouts, and at two points, the laterite outer wall displayed greyish black shadows—spots were Mysorean canons had hit the rampart. Ever since we ‘conquered’ the Konoor Gate, I can only imagine NH 544 as the path by which a massive army marched across fields and rivers and mountain passes, burning and pillaging as armies are wont to do, but laying a road that is still the backbone of Kerala.</p>
<p>History in Kerala is often a lived experience, as it is in many other parts of South Asia. How can it not be when I cross railway stations named Chirayankeezhu and Neyyatinkara while reading a British survey from the 1810s that talks of these little towns: the narrow lanes that lead to temples, the numerous ponds in which people bathe, the homesteads surrounded by gardens filled with the jack, mango, arecanut, cashew, and the omnipresent coconut trees? It is easy to Orientalise interior Kerala as seemingly bound in a time-warp, as the colonisers once did, but we know better.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thunder in Kerala doesn’t rumble, it roars like a caged animal unleashed. And when it does, you run to unplug electric cables and then make some really hot chaaya</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I rolled out from under Marthanda Varma’s bed at Padmanabhapuram Palace, the lady guide stationed there asked me: “Have you seen the lizards?”</p>
<p>“The l..lizards?”</p>
<p>I was flummoxed. Did she mean there were lizards under the bed? As I continued to look around for imaginary mini-reptiles, the guides exchanged grins and led me to the little connecting door off the main room and unhooked it. The lady guide pointed and said, “There are six. Can you find them?”</p>
<p>Malayalee humour had found its way into the beautiful wooden door, within the carved foliates of whose central plank are a number of little lizards sculpted so as to be seen only if one looks closely. I could almost imagine the craftsman who made the door smiling to himself as he bent over with his chisel thinking: ‘I am going to give the king something to do every day before he goes to the ladies.’</p>
<p>In the course of the last two years, I have encountered things so beautiful, things that not many have seen because as with everything in Kerala, you have to search to find them. Hill Palace in Thrippunithura, considered an inferior cousin to the Dutch Palace at Mattanchery, was Kerala’s answer to the engineered gardens of Europe. Time and neglect has wrought havoc on its terraced landscape, but if you walk the grounds at Hill Palace, you can still find gorgeously-ruined fountain basins and beautiful lion-shaped spouts that once carried water into them through a patchwork of canals. If John Ruskin were alive (and decided to be less of an Anglophile) he would have found these gardens, and Kerala at large, covered in the ‘patina of age’ that he much admired in the architecture of Ancient Greece.</p>
<p>But, as importantly, in Kerala I have met people who have been kind even when they were being parochial. I have had KSRTC bus personnel stop the bus and run after a paper file that I accidentally dropped when I boarded the bus. A government office clerk personally mailed my permit letters because she knew how important it was for me to receive them. A fellow passenger looked away to give me some privacy as I teared up watching my son on WhatsApp, missing him so much that my insides felt like they were melting. And there was a police officer who acted as if he didn’t see me taking a photo that I wasn’t supposed to take but needed for my research.</p>
<p>None of this is like those ‘God’s Own Country’ advertisements. They don’t show the big fat mosquitoes by the backwaters, the ridiculous humidity that will clothe you in sweat before you leave your bathroom even after a cold shower. And unless you really, really want to see Kathakali performances, you are not going to see them. But, what the advertisements also miss entirely is that sense of peace you find in ordinary journeys looking out of the window of the <em>Jan Shatabdi Express</em> at the numerous backwaters dotting Kerala’s coastline, wondering why it is that you ran away from all this in the first place. My research has forced me to see Kerala with new eyes, to look beyond its sins and follies, and bear the patriarchy with more tolerance. Maybe that tolerance is possible because I now know that change is gradual, and while we agitate for change, we still have to live with and amongst those who disagree with us.</p>
<p>I am still not sure if I belong here anymore. But it is certain that Kerala will always be a part of me, for Malayalee humour is in my blood, the spicy beef and pork dishes are in my bones, and the sights and scents that made me find my way back home will hopefully be etched in my dissertation.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Theeternity1.jpg?itok=QVfr-Csu" /><div>BY: Deepthi Murali</div><div>Node Id: 24269</div>Thu, 03 May 2018 08:57:22 +0000vijayopen24269 at http://www.openthemagazine.comA Pilgrimage to Grand Slam Citieshttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/travel-issue-2018/a-pilgrimage-to-grand-slam-cities
<p>FOR MOST SPORTS fans around the world, travelling to a FIFA World Cup is considered the ultimate pilgrimage. In 2014, I too made the journey to the holy land; the holiest, in fact, in terms of football countries: Brazil. While the country, its people and the football lived up to the hype, for me, personally, Brazil was a hindrance (a beautiful obstacle, if you may) that put the brakes on my real travel dream—that of watching live Grand Slam tennis.</p>
<p>The 50-something-days stay in Brazil, from end-May to mid-July that year spanned both the French Open and Wimbledon. And I was too cash-strapped before and after the World Cup to bother about travelling to either the Australian Open in January or the US Open in September. Which made 2014 a break year—the only one since I began my annual pilgrimage to one of the four Slam venues— in terms of paying obeisance to the gods of tennis.</p>
<p>We Grand Slam travellers are a bizarre lot. We plot and plan and scheme and invest incredible sums of energy, time and money to achieve what could just as easily be achieved, minus the trials and tribulations, in our living rooms. Three out of the four Slams are held in the greatest metropolises in the world—Paris, London and New York. Yet, when we reach those destinations, we travel to obscure suburbs by buses and trains to lock ourselves into stadiums all day long, every day. Sightseeing, if we have any energy left, can be done by night. Why? The answer lies in the most quoted line from the most widely loved article on tennis in the 21st century, authored by the late David Foster Wallace. ‘The truth is,’ he wrote in the <em>New York Times</em> during his first visit to Wimbledon in 2006, ‘that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.’</p>
<p>Sometimes our sincerest efforts of plotting and planning to be witnesses to genius aren’t enough. The tickets, even to the nosebleed sections, are limited, and the demand, in an era glutted with greats, is plentiful. Being ticketless, however, seldom rains on our parade; a ground pass (purchased at an overhead cost of an expensive diner breakfast) gives us access to grassy mounds and garden squares with giant screens. And there we sit among fellow rejects, all of us smug with knowledge of the fact that the venerated are in the vicinity.</p>
<p>Making a Grand Slam the centrepiece of your travel plan is fraught with uncertainty. The fundamental variables revolve around passes and players. Should we book tickets for the early rounds and watch our favourites breeze past mid-level talents? Or, should we hedge our funds on the semis and the final and spend two excruciating weeks praying that the cream rises to the top?</p>
<p>And there’s the uncertainty of weather too. What if rain pushes the schedule, and along with it the men’s final, beyond the second Sunday? As a rule, I stay back in the city hosting the Slam till the Monday after the championship ends. These days, with million-dollar roofs crowning most show-courts, tennis majors tend to end within the stipulated time. Still, a vacant post-Slam Monday is a must. Apart from being a safety net, it becomes a day of quiet reflection and assessing dejections or achievements. Also, it is the only day we Grand Slam travellers get to see the darned city in broad daylight.</p>
<p>MY FIRST TRYST with the majors was at the first Slam of any given calendar year, the Australian Open. In 2012, even before my flight landed in Melbourne, the most sporty city in the world, fate had conspired to make my maiden Slam experience an exceptional one. While my aircraft soared somewhere over the South China Sea, Roger Federer had defeated Juan Martin Del Potro in the men’s quarterfinals to set up a semi-final clash with his breathtaking rival, Rafa Nadal. The greatest sports rivalry in the 21st century, then, would be initiation into live Slam tennis. Only now did I understand why this major is referred to as the Happy Slam.</p>
<p>Unlike any other Slam city, the venue of the Australian Open occupies prime land in the heart of Melbourne. A short tram ride away from the bustle of Flinders Street, Melbourne Park lies wrapped within the coils of the river Yarra, its waters black as ink, and under the heavy shadow cast by the Melbourne Cricket Ground. For the ticketless, there’s Garden Square, a large-screen viewing area bracketed by stone busts of former Australian tennis legends, filled to the brim with sun-kissed bodies on beach chairs. Although just a few metres away from the leafy and cobbled garden, the Rod Laver Arena seems a claustrophobic world apart.</p>
<p>Fifteen thousand spectators are magically crammed into the smallest show-court in the Slam world, a stadium so tiny it has no bad seats. The sky-blue surface and the lawn green seats give the Rod Laver Arena the look and feel of an inverted bullring, which a certain Spaniard took full advantage of in the first semi-final. So loud are Nadal’s grunts on that night that a seagull poops on court from the rafters above and play is temporarily stopped. Apart from that, Federer’s thrashing goes uninterrupted.</p>
<p>In the second semi-final, Novak Djokovic beats Andy Murray in five sets over five hours and it is widely considered the match of the tournament, until it is put to shame the following night. For a shade under six hours, Nadal and Djokovic yank each other from side to side in the final, bruising their bodies, destroying our collective sense of belief. When Djokovic wins the final point and both men collapse on buckled knees, it marks the conclusion of the longest-ever final in tennis history. Seated beside me in the arena is Rohit Brijnath, the Roger Federer of sports writers. Brijnath throws a sympathetic arm around my shoulder and says: “<em>This</em> was your first Slam final? Poor bastard. What a ridiculous yardstick to live with.”</p>
<p>GETTING TO WIMBLEDON is easy—take the District Line on the Tube and disembark at Southfields station. Getting <em>inside</em> Wimbledon is hard, very hard—barricaded by 150 years worth of self-love and tradition. On my first attempt, in the first week of The Championships in 2013, I was turned around at the tube station itself. “There are over 5,000 queuers waiting for on-day tickets who may or may not gain entry into the grounds. This is a waste of your time,” a Wimbledon groundstaff says into her megaphone.</p>
<p>Wimbledon is often referred to as the Mecca of tennis and there are only three legit methods of ensuring this ultimate pilgrimage leads beyond the wrought- iron gates of the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC). One: become a Debenture Ticket Holder— that is, pay £50,000 to get two Centre Court tickets for each day of Wimbledon for a period of five years. Two: enter the annual Ballot and hope with crossed fingers that your name-card is picked in the lottery. And three: get physically into a line known simply as The Queue.</p>
<p>AELTC allows a maximum of 5,000 queuers to enter its premises daily. If your queue card reads ‘No. 5001’, it’s highly likely you won’t get in; unless at least one person ahead of you retires from the line. But even entry into AELTC doesn’t give you access to the show-courts—Centre Court, Court No 1 and Court No 2. For that, one must be within the first 1,500. And if you are hell bent on getting into Centre Court, like I am, you have to be within the first 500 and, hence, are advised to queue up at least 24 hours earlier, with a tent in tow. To gain entry for People’s Saturday, I queue up on Thursday night. My queue card number for Saturday is 274—access to Centre Court, the cathedral of tennis, is now a guarantee.</p>
<p>The camp-site, located just beyond Wimbledon’s golf course, has a total of two porta-loos and nothing else. Yet, this frugal pasture is the closest thing to tennis paradise. The air is rich with rain and anticipation and fellow pilgrims exchanging heart-warming stories. My neighbours for the next 36 hours are a father-daughter duo from Poland who occupy two leaky tents. They are drenched and ecstatic. “The last time we were here, it was raining like today and we arrived with two sleeping bags and an umbrella,” says the father. “It wasn’t pleasant.”</p>
<p>At 6 am on Saturday, a steward wakes us up to start the day’s queue. Two hours later, I get my first view of the sacred bed of grass, framed by pristine white lines. My Centre Court seat is directly besides the green commentary booth. Minutes before the first match on schedule begins, the legendary John McEnroe— three-time Wimbledon champion and The Championships’ official commentator since he hung up his racquet—steps out of the booth and folds his arms across his chest. “Gorgeous,” he says, without taking his eyes off the court, and pops back in.</p>
<p>THE 7 TRAIN ploughs its way, overground, deep into Queens, the grimiest borough of New York City. But even as Manhattan’s skyline flattens in the distance, a space-age structure appears high over the rows of abandoned warehouses, half-filled parking lots and brimming tenements. On view, passengers in baseball caps and khaki shorts make their way to the train’s door, for their destination, the US Open, cannot be far away. The structure, Arthur Ashe Stadium, is the largest tennis arena in the world, seating close to 25,000 spectators at a go. And none of those spectators are ever told that tennis is a game observed in silence.</p>
<p>The US Open is everything Wimbledon isn’t. It doesn’t care for tradition, doesn’t take itself too seriously and like everything else American, is larger than life. Between games, thunderous music reverberates through the stadium as fans dance on their seats even as the in- stadia camera captures visiting celebrities on their four large screens. And during games, ticket-holders loiter in and out of Ashe to replenish beer glasses the size of small buckets. Munching jaws and gulping throats mix effortlessly with the overall chatter and there’s a constant low-frequency buzz in the players’ eardrums.</p>
<p>In 2015, the year I first visit the loudest Slam, something incredible happens—a wizard makes all of NYC fall silent. During his march to the final, Roger Federer has introduced a trick-shot called the SABR (Sneak Attack By Roger) and round after round, 25,000 spectators watch in awe. Gaping mouths, after all, cannot talk. NYC finds its voice post-match during his on-court interviews where fans interrupt his speech and scream “WeloooooveyouuuuRoger” and he replies, “I love you too.”</p>
<p>For two weeks, noise is replaced by love and love carries an old man who many believed to be past his prime into the second Sunday, where he meets Djokovic, then in the prime of his career. Djokovic wins. The spell is broken. New York has its ambient sounds back again.</p>
<p>TO WATCH RAFA Nadal play in Paris is akin to spotting a tiger in the jungles of Kanha. The red clay is his natural habitat. No other tennis player has dominated a surface in the history of the sport quite like Nadal has owned the one made of crushed brick. In 2014, when he won yet another Slam on clay, he had in fact won his ninth French Open in 10 years of participation. But three years later, in 2017, when I decide to make Nadal and Roland Garros the fulcrum of my first travel to mainland Europe, I am nervous. In the past two years, the Spaniard’s kingdom has vastly receded; territory snatched away by <em>arrivistes</em>. Not just that: in the past two years, Nadal has failed to cross the quarterfinal stage of his ‘home’ Slam.</p>
<p>Still, bookings on Court Philippe Chatrier—Paris’ show-court—are made once my Rafa-mad spouse presents a compelling case: “To watch Nadal hit one ball on clay will make the entire trip worthwhile.” Not too different from sighting a tiger’s upright earlobe through the thickets and feeling satisfied following six hours of driving in vain, I think, and to France we go.</p>
<p>Roland Garros is located in the 16th <em>arrondissement</em> of Paris, well into the western outskirts of the city. But if someone is to take you there blindfolded past Belleville and Notre Dame and Montmartre and the Louvre and untie the fold only when you reach Chatrier with Nadal on court, you can still boast of having witnessed the best Paris has to offer.</p>
<p>Chatrier’s four stands are named after France’s four greatest tennis players—Lacoste, Borotra, Brugnon and Cochet. From each of their laps, we watch four different rounds involving Nadal, the pre-quarters, quarters, semis and final. But the best view is from Tribune Cochet, located directly behind the court’s left tramline. From here, one can see the spin imparted on the ball by Nadal’s whipping racquet and the height at which it climbs over the net and spits up at the opponent, deep into the baseline.</p>
<p>One such sledgehammer stroke clips the frame of Stan Wawrinka’s racquet and no return is made. Instantly, Nadal’s falls on his back and cries into the dry soil. He has won his historic tenth French Open title. The party shifts to the banks of the river Seine, where late into the Paris night, men and women drunk on cheap wine scream <em>‘Vamos</em> Rafa’ at passing cruise boats.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Thegrandtour1.jpg?itok=yislRNVE" /><div>BY: Aditya Iyer</div><div>Node Id: 24268</div>Thu, 03 May 2018 08:21:25 +0000vijayopen24268 at http://www.openthemagazine.comRomancing the Rainhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/travel-issue-2018/romancing-the-rain
<p>IN MORE THAN a decade of lugging around a camera bag everywhere I go, I am yet to come across any photographer who doesn’t have a love-hate relationship with the rains. Monsoons are when lenses become foggy, cameras mouldy and batteries dead. My worst torment so far has been Mumbai’s deluge of 2005. As I was stepping out of my housing society, our secretary blocked my way, saying it is too risky outside. I gently nudged Saraf uncle aside and began taking photographs of the building’s sweeper trying to cross the flooded street armed with no more than grit and a broken umbrella.</p>
<p>There have been good times, too, though. Like when I tagged along with a musician friend, the pint-sized powerhouse singer Shilpa Rao, to Petrapol on the Indo Bangla border in 2016. She performed for a hangar full of border security forces from both sides. It had been raining all night and it continued through the day of the concert too. “<em>Yahaan baarish band hi nahin hoti</em>,” said the soldier who often offers to bring me discounted liquor from the Army canteen (which I politely refuse). What struck me most acutely was the ‘<em>bandobast</em>’, a man walking in a waterlogged compound of the Integrated Check Point, balancing a plate of steaming <em>kebabs</em> for a joint lunch—probably the most delicious ones I’ve ever had, second only to the Galoutis of Lucknow.</p>
<p>Further ahead, in Meghalaya, clouds wander aimlessly long before and after the showers. The fragrance of <em>lal cha</em> and pork wrestle for supremacy over your senses, crosses of graves on hillocks on the way to Laitlyngkot emerge from the fog at every turn, while kids stick closer to their parents. If you know Bernie and Rajesh or Samrat, my friends in Shillong, they might take you to idyllic hamlets that are straight out of a dream. If not, you can see some of them on your way to a cave expedition in Jaintia hills. At Police Bazar, after I bought some cool clothes and shoes, a man buying old currency notes asked me if I had been to Cherrapunji, the wettest place on earth. An archer stepped in to dispute him, insisting that Mawsynram is, but a Marwari seth at Mishtan Bhandar scowled and asked us to either come in and order, or move away from the entrance of his shop.</p>
<p>In Ladakh, the rain usually arrives with the tourists. Resort owners hustle about to install toilet tents for the hordes of Innovas that will soon take over Pangong Tso, infamously also known as the <em>3 Idiots</em> selfie point. Clouds dancing at will and gentle showers cooling the harsh sun made me wish I could stay here forever, till a Honey Singh song snapped me out of that delusion.</p>
<p>Closer home, I find the rains of Maharashtra and Goa are as alike as they are different. And as much as I love trekking, my camera bag makes the climb harder for me than the rest, but once down the summit, nothing comes close to the feeling of biting into that steaming hot <em>vada pav</em>. I remember being commissioned once by a travel magazine to photograph the best homestays on the Konkan coast in peak monsoon season. Every beach seemed like it was mine, empty and plastic bag free. To make life easy, I hired a local rickshaw and we snaked through villages eating at ‘Gharguti Khanavads’ whose laterite boundary walls had a fluorescent carpet of moss. Like in Kerala, everything that’s left outside and untouched for more than a week gets draped in a coat of green. Or sometimes, plastic.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Romanchingrain1.jpg?itok=3LNiiao_" /><div>BY: Text and Photographs by Ritesh Uttamchandani</div><div>Node Id: 24267</div>Thu, 03 May 2018 08:09:41 +0000vijayopen24267 at http://www.openthemagazine.com